New Search Engine www.cuil.com to beat Google

A startup founded by engineers from Google Inc. and other tech giants is launching a search engine that claims to cover three times as many Web pages as Google. Cuil Inc. plans to launch today and is optimistic to deliver better results than other major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Cuil will have better abilities by having an interface that helps clients search across more Web pages and study them more accurately.

The site’s results page resembles an online magazine — a different look and feel from search juggernaut Google’s. “You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president, and one of the engineers.

Cuil search Engine was developed and being run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google flagship search engine in pretty much every way. The difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Cuil does not assign priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does. Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Cuil results are automatically categorized.

When you search for a common name, Cuil will give you a result page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In comparison to Google’s globe-spanning data network of data centers, Cuil’s two puny data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total run fast to outpace Google’s crawlers.

The search engine will make its maiden debut today and certainly with its great publicity so far, will rink in the online media and pages as a force to reckon with. However, even before it goes all the way, Cuil is getting the worst consumer dissonance ever. Online surfers have said it’s even worse than Alta Vista and that it’s a pathetic search Engine. But we have to wait and see what these ex-Google guys are offering.

by David M N James